Paul Lisicky’s Song So Wild and Blue is a brilliantly drawn portrait of his life and the profound effect one artist’s work can have on another’s.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“In his radiant memoir, Lisicky emphasizes the creations of Joni Mitchell, not the person. He discusses the effect her music had, and still has, on his own artistry as author and singer led parallel lives, separated by time and distance. . . In fourth grade he sang a song about angel hair and ice castles and knew it was different and that the songwriter was also different. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship—two kindred spirits who never met. This a remarkable act of literary imagination.”
In his own words, here is Paul Lisicky‘s Book Notes music playlist for his book Song So Wild and Blue:
I’ve always been interested in music that tests my sense of what’s good. “Good,” of course, is an elusive, imprecise, even lazy notion. Do we think a song is good because it’s absorbing? Or familiar—does it remind us of other music we’re drawn to? Or are we not even thinking of the song per se, but how we feel as we’re listening to the song—how it clarifies or extends the emotional state we’re in as we’re waiting for a long-lost sibling to walk up to the front door and ring the bell?
On first listen, I never know what to do with a Joni Mitchell song. Usually, I’m outside of it, thinking about its moves and turns from some distance. It’s possible that this is terrible, my mind says, possible that she’s lost it finally. But there’s some seed buried deep in the song’s compost that makes me come back to it. In part, it involves meticulousness—the combination of meticulousness and spontaneity that shapes it musically, harmonically, melodically, vocally. Only after five, six listens am I fully in song, with it. My circuitry has changed. I’m new—or at least not quite the person I was before I settled into its chord changes.
Song So Wild and Blue is my love letter to the artist who’s shaped my writing (and thus my life) more than any other figure. She walks in through a side door in my previous six books, and this is the first time I’ve looked at her influence head on, giving her the homage she deserves. It’s part biography, part what it means to be an artist across a life, so other mentors make their way in too. A voice is never developed in isolation. Rather, it’s talking back to other voices. Sometimes the older Joni talks back to the younger Joni, and sometimes vice versa, as if she could already see who she’d become over the span of decades.
Here are fifteen songs that feel like a conversation happening across boundaries: under-seen Joni, songwriters influenced by Joni, maybe even some who wish they could secretly take a vacation from Joni from time to time. So many others could have made appearances here: St. Vincent, Prince, Wayne Shorter, Laura Nyro, Chappell Roan, Lizzy McAlpine, Lana Del Rey, Björk, Sonic Youth, Mitski, Chaka Khan, Weyes Blood, Madison Cunningham, Grizzly Bear, David Crosby, Bob Dylan, The Weather Station, Elvis Costello, Taylor Swift, Sufjan Stevens— I love the fact that this list could keep unspooling.
1. Rainy Night House (Miles of Ailes, 1974)
A bit of an outlier as a Joni Mitchell song, at least when it comes to the words. Lyrically, it has more in common with Leonard Cohen, with its imagistic non-sequiturs, its references to the sacred. In the original from Ladies of the Canyon, the soprano-voiced Joni emerges as an innocent: half child, half adult, stranded with an inscrutable lover, vaguely menacing and compelling. Three years later, Joni sang the song as part of the Miles of Aisles tour in a looser, more sultry voice, and that’s the version I’m most drawn to. Maybe because the speaker’s position feels more dramatically compelling. She knows what she’s doing this time and, despite reservations that remain unspoken, she’s still taking a look around.
2. Rest in Pleasure (Emily’s D+Evolution, Esperanza Spalding, 2016)
The album Emily’s D+Evolution feels at times like a hybrid of The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. At the same time, it’s entirely itself, drawing does from jazz, Broadway, pop, R&B. I could have pulled practically any song from the album for this list—“Good Lava,” for instance, feels like a distant musical cousin of “Black Crow”—but I like the way this song sits beside the others here, in all its forthrightness and ardor.
3. Golden Lady (Stevie Wonder, Inner Visions, 1973)
In 2004, Joni told Elvis Costello that Stevie Wonder had told her that “she’d influenced some of his pieces,” mostly when it came to their chordal direction. I think you can hear some of that here—not only in the freeform piano of the opening, but throughout its key changes and harmonic turns. Joni, in turn, has talked about taking direction from the heavier bass line on Wonder’s albums from the early 1970s. There is no evidence to suggest that Joni is the Golden Lady in question here, but every time I listen to this song, I always imagine her as its muse.
4. My Secret Place (Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, 1988)
According to Joni, “24 guitars play the same part” on this track, the opening cut of 1988’s Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm. One wouldn’t expect that multi-tracking to work on the production level, but all those layers only intensify the fraught intimacy of the relationship at its center. The 1980s was the decade of the pop icon duet, and this is Joni and Peter Gabriel’s contribution to the genre, though, they manage to sound so much alike that it’s hard to them apart at times. In fact, one voice can cut into another on a single line. My favorite move? That spacious E flat minor 11 chord at the end of the first two lines of each verse.
5. Talk to Me (Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, 1977)
I don’t know of any other Joni listener who likes this song as much as I do, and maybe that’s part of why I feel attached to it. Its chords are so open that they’re barely grounded. Always on the verge of flying apart, the conversational melody doesn’t lay down heavy markers either. I’ve always been a sucker for a list, and there are several here, glorious in their wit: “we could talk about power / about Jesus and Hitler and Howard Hughes / or Charlie Chaplin’s movies / or Bergman’s Nordic blues.”
6. Take the Night Off (Laura Marling, Once I Was an Eagle, 2013)
Laura Marling has written a large body of work that talks back to Joni, but this song stands out for its guitar work, its chromaticism, and its opening tuning (CGCGGE), which recalls the raga-inflected “Conversation” and “This Flight Tonight.” I love the fact that the guitar is never prettied up or controlled, its rough physicality summoning up the body, all the eros at the heart of the song: “Take the night off / and be bad for me.”
7. pawnshop (Kara Jackson, Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love, 2023)
Whenever I hear this song, I’m reminded of shorter Joni lyrics like “Electricity” and “Barangrill”—songs that develop an extended metaphor. This one also feels like it stitches multiple genres into its sleeve—folk, jazz, blues, country—which is in line with most of Joni’s songs in that they never occupy a single genre but come to life as hybrids of multiple influences.
8. Man from Mars (Taming the Tiger, 1998)
Joni and Laura Nyro were fans of each other’s work and were open about their back-and-forth musical influence. Joni, in fact, was in the audience for some of Laura’s final concerts in Los Angeles in the 1990s. I can hear Laura’s melodic leaps throughout this song, a bit of her harmonic language, her ability to spin a kind of theatrical longing into sound.
9. Last Chance Lost (Turbulent Indigo, 1994)
I think of this song as being the precursor to “Man from Mars”—at the very least it’s a musical sibling. An unfurling of a relationship in which there is no clear aggressor and victim, no truce, no resolution any time soon. It’s a song in which the melody, with its sustained vowels, chafes against the underlying chords. The acoustic guitar work is central too: the buzz of slack strings complicating the elegance of its vocal statement: a soliloquy of disappointment that resonates much longer than three minutes, fifteen seconds.
10. Maple to Paper (Maple to Paper, Becca Stevens, 2024)
This could have appeared on either of Joni’s first two albums, which I think are under -appreciated for their modal palettes, landscapes that rearrange American folk song tradition. Lyrically, this song of transformation mirrors Joni’s songs of extended metaphor, while managing to feel unexpectedly personal. There’s a loss at the center of this song—perhaps too comprehensive to pin down—and it charts the singer’s attempt to live alongside it.
11. If (Shine, 2007)
That rare Joni song that I felt and loved on first listen. That was largely to do with the guitar tuning and the chords it produces, which convey a lushness and a sense of being underwater. The lyrics, based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem, point to Joni’s intermittent self-help streak, evident across For the Roses and Hejira. But the verbal directness of its message is complicated by themystery suggested by those minor 11th chords and chiming harmonics. I feel rewired by that sequence of tones every time I hear it. It’s always new.
12. Impossible Dreamer (Dog Eat Dog, 1985)
I think I first actually heard this song when I listened to Joni’s solo piano performance at the Duke of York Theater in December 1985. Before then, it had always been the flare of optimism on Dog Eat Dog, the album best known for its experiments with synthesizers, its turmoil and rage over Reagan-era policy. The acoustic version gives us the chance to hear the song’s foundations in Brill Building pop, conjuring up Carole King and Laura Nyro. At the same time the song’s brightness always telegraphs its opposite—“no acid rain / love without pain” —the oppositional framework of most of Joni’s imagery.
13. Play it Right (Sylvan Esso, Sylvan Esso, 2014)
Amelia Meath, one of the two musicians behind Sylvan Esso, speaks so beautifully of growing up with Joni’s music on The Road to Joni podcast. For Meath, it is Joni’s melodic—rather than harmonic—sense that captures her imagination, and you can hear faint echoes of the angularities from Blue here. Think of “Carey” and “California” in their audacious reach.
14. Lullaby for My Insomniac (James Blake, Assume Form, 2019)
There isn’t a Joni song that sounds this untethered to rhythm, but this piece reminds me of her work in ways that feel more hidden than overt. Maybe it’s that sense of testing, trying, breaking through the musical pattern in order to touch the unknown. Not to mention its basis in art song. The unorthodox, wide-open chords floating in space, as if tuned to a dream.
15. Refuge of the Roads (Hejira, 1976)
So many images from this song have carved themselves into my imagination for years: the highway service station, the cold cuts, the overflowing nets, the crickets clicking in the ferns, the thunderhead, the earth as a marbled bowling ball. Because of that, I sometimes forget to take in the mental trajectory from first verse to final, from (almost) self-pity to benevolent detachment. It’s new for me every time I hear it. How many songs can you say that about after having listened to them hundreds of times? Only last night I felt the emotion breaking through her voice when she sings of the “clouds of Michelangelo.” So much restraint across all the songs of Hejira, and for brief one moment her voice is the sun itself.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Paul Lisicky’s playlist for The Narrow Door
Paul Lisicky’s playlist for The Burning House
Paul Lisicky is the author of seven books, including Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, The Cut, Fence, the New York Times, Ploughshares, and in many other publications. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Rose Dorothea Award from the Provincetown Library. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Antioch University Los Angeles, Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere. He is currently a Professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University–Camden, where he is Editor of StoryQuarterly. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.